We all go through busy times in our lives. For a lot of us, some of those busy times are coming up later this month and next. For others, those times are year-around. Stuff like that can affect training and sometimes that’s unavoidable. When one of my lifters finds himself in this situation, I often use a Flex Template.

A template is simply a designation of what work you do on what days. If Monday’s workout starts with your main squat movement, then goes to bench assistance work, followed by bench supplemental work, that’s part of your weekly template. Flex templates are similar, except we attach priorities to things. We have several varieties of Flex Template that we use. The simplest is to just attach a priority to the workouts of the week. Priority 1 is your most important training session of the week. Priority 2 is the second-most-important and so on. Another way of using a flex template is to not assign days to your work at all. Simply stack up your work for the week into one giant list and order it all in priority order. It helps to use some categories to help keep things organized. It’s important to note that these are not workouts. It’s just a “to do list”. You then make the workouts based on time and energy available.

Above: Example of a flex template

The point of using a flex template is that you can get all your high priority work done. If you do have to skip training for some reason (and reasons do happen from time to time), you can be sure that the training you miss is the low-priority work and it will have a minimal impact on your progress.

Busy times are some of the most important times to be thorough with training preparations. I get some people who want to stop coaching when their life gets crazy. On one hand I understand the sentiment of not wanting to pay for coaching when you can’t give it 100%. But on the other hand, times like that are when the decisions you make are amplified in importance. Good decisions can have a disproportionately high value. It’s much more critical to get things right when your resources are constrained. When you have all the time and energy in the world, it’s easier. When things are tough, that’s when the trade offs are critical.

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About the AuthorMike Tuchscherer is the owner and head coach at RTS. He has been powerlifting since 2001 and since has traveled all over the world for competitions. In 2009, he was the first man from USA powerlifting to win a gold medal at the World Games – the highest possible achievement in powerlifting. He has coached over a dozen competitors at the world championships, a score of national champions, and multiple world record holders.